Rooney's silence on Steelers' turmoil defeaning

Chris MuellerSpecial to the Times

Tuesday

Jan 1, 2019 at 9:23 PMJan 1, 2019 at 9:23 PM

One assumes that Art Rooney II, the Steelers' owner, is fine with what has happened to his team this season. Surely he would have said something, were he angry about the franchise's latest humiliation, one that saw Antonio Brown miss the season finale, with what was initially reported to be a knee injury, yet turned out to be anything but.

The story was, of course, far more tabloid-worthy than a simple knee ailment.

Brown essentially skipped the Bengals game after getting into an argument with Ben Roethlisberger mid-week. He didn't participate in practice the rest of the week, skipped the team's Saturday walkthrough, yet showed up at Heinz Field expecting to play. Why he didn't suit up is still a mystery, one that hopefully will be cleared up by Mike Tomlin sometime around noon today, but as of now it's anyone's guess.

The bet here is that Tomlin didn't suspend Brown for the game and tell him to take a hike. That would have made too much sense, would have been an example of the head coach showing a little backbone with his team's most talented malcontent.

More than likely, the head coach did absolutely nothing about the situation, preferring to ignore it in the hopes that it would go away, or that publicly addressing such behavior was beneath a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

If so, he was just following Rooney's lead. The arrogance trickling down from the owner's box is as prodigious as it is misplaced.

You'd think the Steelers were working on Super Bowl number 11, not number seven. You'd think they, not the New England Patriots, were the gold standard in the NFL this century. You'd think that the Steelers ran like a well-oiled machine, with players handling their business on and off the field.

This team is closer to broken than anything else. Rooney is fiddling while the Steelers burn—or at least, smolder.

Dan Rooney was a football man. It was his intervention in the 1970s that turned the Steelers into a dynasty that ruled the NFL that same decade. He took over most operational control from Art Rooney Sr. and the team got better almost instantly.

Most importantly, he cared, and it showed.

It's fair to wonder whether that passion for the sport and for overall excellence was passed down to his son. At best, Art Rooney II seems mildly engaged—at worst, completely indifferent to the product on the field.

He runs the team from afar, and were the Steelers not the city's favorite team, he would be ridiculed as being more in the shadows than Bob Nutting.

Nutting, despite his infrequent comments, still speaks more about the state of his team than Rooney does about his.

Maybe he just thinks that owning the Steelers means that things will sort themselves out, that the mere continued existence of the franchise promises excellence. Certainly, some of the less-accomplished players on the team seem to think that suiting up in black and gold is all they need to do, and that opponents will cower in fear at the mere sight of the uniform.

That's a preposterous fiction, of course, and this year proved it. But years of lackluster results, of infuriating playoff exits, of successful regular seasons pockmarked by soap opera-quality drama? All of that is very real. It's on the ledger. And things seem like they're going to get worse before they get better. Or at the very least, stay the same.

Tomlin will still be the coach next year. Brown isn't going anywhere. Roethlisberger will be here as long as he wants to be, and is playing at a high level. The Steelers' key figures will be the same in 2019 as they were in 2018.

Only a declaration of extreme dissatisfaction from Art II, and subsequent sweeping changes, can alter the Steelers' future narrative.

The problem is, all of that would require him to actually care about what has happened to this proud franchise.

His silence on the matter is deafening.

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